The Boston Consulting Group and Manager Magazin honor 100 women each year – whether they be managers, entrepreneurs, or advisers – who have rendered outstanding services to the German economy. This year, the Mannheim economist Professor Michèle Tertilt is one of them.
“As professor at the University of Mannheim and recipient of academic honors of the highest renown, she researches in a reasonable and persistent way the impact of gender roles and family structures on economic growth, investments in human capital, and economic development. She wants to scrap income splitting for married couples, but she is undecided on gender quotas,” the jury justifies their decision.
Since 2015, the Manager Magazin presents the top 100 women in its first annual issue each year. The candidates who come from different sectors are chosen not for the formal offices they hold but for the real-life impact they wield. Aside from entrepreneurs, this includes managers, supervisory board members, expatriates (German managers abroad), and influencers.
In her research, Michèle Tertilt focuses on macroeconomics and development economics as well as family economics and finance. She has been Professor of Economics at the University of Mannheim since 2010. In 2019, she received the renowned Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for her outstanding work in the field of macroeconomics and development economics as well as family economics and finance.
In her latest publication, she investigated the impact of COVID-19 on female employment in Nigeria. Tertilt’s team showed that women with school-age children are most affected by the decline in employment – similar to women in the USA. But women in Nigeria regained their jobs faster than women in high-income countries. The researchers suspect that the reason for this is most likely the high income losses during the pandemic.